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Erongo Regional Electricity Distributor Launches New Contact Center

April 17, 2014

Namibia’s Erongo Regional Electricity Distributor (RED) has created, developed, and launched a new contact center  to help with the increasing demands from customer’s inquiries. The electricity distributor for the Erongo Region has its main office in Walvis Bay and has been seeing a continual increase in phone calls and customer questions.


Some say the new center was designed as a way to prevent and inform customers better from the power shortages the company experienced back in 2013. Although RED urged customers to use as little power as possible many were without power for a significant amount of time. This call center will help to inform people as quickly as possible.

The center is designed to help with customer retention, satisfaction, and overall effectiveness. Additionally, the company plans on implementing an entire new set of communication tools, which are expected to enhance the communication between the call center and the company’s head office.

"The master plan was carried out in two phases. The first phase was to ensure that the organization was adequately prepared for the procurement of a fully integrated, fully functional customer friendly call centre," said acting general manager of Erongo RED, Nico Niemand.

The company noted that the initial idea was to establish a call center four years ago. This fizzled out as newer more efficient plans came to the drawing board and the Electricity Control Board finally developed a master plan.

The center will be completed in two phases. The first phase consisted of the initial plans, meetings of what was need to help customers more efficiently, and how to make communication throughout the company improve. Now the second phase will include the actually expansion of services to customers, speed up responses to, and create and operate a brand new SMS hotline to enable Enrongo RED to disseminate information of possible power cuts and other system upgrades to its clients as quickly as possible.

"One of the aims of the centre is to decrease the number of complaints and increase the response on enquiries,” said Niemand. According to him, the center got almost 30,000 calls last year and has already logged almost 20,000 between January and February of this year.

"The launching of the call centre is part of our efforts to improve communication. Currently Erongo RED is the only electricity provider that has a call centre in Namibia, thus we can say that the launching of the call centre is just one of the many investments we made in Erongo Region to benefit all our clients," Erongo CEO Robert Kahimise said.




Edited by Peter Bernstein



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